1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method of controlling activation of a home automation system, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method of controlling activation of a home automation system, which sequentially activates a plurality of electric home appliances to prevent the electric home appliances from being simultaneously activated.
2. Description of the Related Art
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing a mutual relationship between an electric home appliance and a gateway processor in a conventional home automation system. As shown in FIG. 1, the conventional home automation system comprises an electric home appliance 1 and a gateway processor 4.
The electric home appliance 1 includes a controller 2 controlling the entire operation of the appliance, and a power line modem 3 connected to a power line PL to perform communication through the power line PL. Both the controller 2 and power line modem 3 are connected to each other through a low speed communication line (for example, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter: UART) to perform mutual communication therebetween. The electric home appliance 1 can be, for example, an air conditioner, a television, a microwave oven, or a washing machine, or a plurality of electric home appliances connected to each other.
The gateway processor 4 includes a power line modem 5 to communicate with the electric home appliance 1 through the power line PL, and a controller 6 to analyze an activation instruction (for example, typically user execution instructions controlling appliance functions/status) received from a user and to transmit the activation instruction through the power line modem 5.
The gateway processor 4 is connected to a plurality of electric home appliances through the power line PL to perform mutual communication therebetween using a contracted communication protocol so as to transmit activation instructions from the user to corresponding electric home appliances. Further, the gateway processor 4 transmits data through the power line PL, in which an activation instruction code corresponding to each activation instruction is attached to each identification code discriminating electric home appliances. Accordingly, each electric home appliance analyzes the identification code, recognizes an activation instruction therefor, and is activated.
The operation of the gateway processor 4 is described in detail with reference to FIG. 2. First, the gateway processor 4 can recognize operation states of a plurality of electric home appliances connected to the power line PL. In this case, the gateway processor 4 transmits inspection signals to the electric home appliances, and at operation 10 recognizes the entire states of the electric home appliances, such as the supply of power to the electric home appliances or their activation states, on the basis of signals which are received from the electric home appliances in response to the inspection signals.
At operation 20, the gateway processor 4 determines whether the process of recognizing the states of all electric home appliances has been completed. If, at operation 20 the recognizing process is not completed, the gateway processor 4 returns to operation 10 to continuously recognize the states of the electric home appliance. If, at operation 20 the recognizing process has been completed, at operation 30 the gateway processor 4 stores state information of the recognized electric home appliances in an internal memory.
Then, at operation 40 the gateway processor 4 determines whether an activation instruction activating an electric home appliance has been received from outside, such as from a user. If, at operation 40 an activation instruction is not received, the gateway processor 4 returns to operation 10. If, at operation 40 an activation instruction has been received, at operation 50 the gateway processor 4 transmits the received activation instruction to a corresponding electric home appliance through the power line modem 5. That is, the gateway processor 4 transmits data in which an activation instruction code is attached to an identification code corresponding to the electric home appliance, thus activating the corresponding electric home appliance.
However, in the conventional home automation system, if an activation instruction to activate a corresponding electric home appliance is received, the gateway processor 4 transmits the activation instruction regardless of operations/states of other electric home appliances. Therefore, if a number of electric home appliances remain to be activated (i.e., are in the process of activation) when a new activation instruction is received, a plurality of electric home appliances may be simultaneously activated. In this way, simultaneous activation of a plurality of electric home appliances can unexpectedly generate a counter voltage on the power line PL. Accordingly, the conventional home automation system is problematic in that it can cause malfunction of the electric home appliances and the gateway processor connected to the power line, or damage to the electric home appliances.
Moreover, in the conventional home automation system, since the gateway processor 4 can receive an activation instruction through a computation network such as the Internet, the system can receive activation instructions activating a plurality of electric home appliances, store them temporarily (stack), and continuously transmit the activation instructions to corresponding electric home appliances. Therefore, a plurality of electric home appliances could be simultaneously activated, so the above problems may occur.